After he parked his car behind the house, he went in through the backdoor and up the stairs. He went to the old lady's bedroom and looked in on her corpse again almost as if he had expected she had moved.
"Thanks," he said. "Now I have to go."
Blaming her made him feel better even though he knew how ridiculous it was. He felt drunk, intoxicated. The evening had been full of ups and downs and it left him giddy. He might even have trouble sleeping, he thought. He was too wired.
He went to his room and packed his bag reluctantly. This place was really very comfortable and he had so looked forward to the morning, to sitting by the lake. It had been so relaxing. The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. It was the old lady's fault. If she hadn't been so pathetic, he wouldn't have killed her.
Of course you would have, he told himself. She would have pointed you out. You had to be sure she couldn't do that.
He continued to argue with himself, even considering remaining one more day, and then, suddenly, it began as always, a slight ringing in his ear. He went to the window and looked into the night.
It was out there... something threatening. It was coming in this direction. He couldn't stay here any longer, no matter what he wanted.
He hurried now and then he rushed out and started down the stairs, still regretting his quick exit. He paused at the foot of the stairs. An idea occurred to him. Confuse the trail, keep whatever it was from following his scent. He went into the kitchen and looked around. The old gas stove was perfect, he thought. Carefully, he prepared the flammable oils and put them in a frying pan. He started the fire and then he let it spread to the molding on the floor. He watched the fire, fascinated with how quickly it invaded the heart of the old wood and crept in behind the walls. He could hear the crackle and the small explosions. The home was as brittle as old bones.
He was saddened by it all as he walked away. By the time he got into his car, he could see the hot illumination in some of the windows. It wouldn't be long, he thought. The fire was ravenous.
He drove away slowly, looking back when either a gas pipe or the heating oil set off an explosion. The flames were crawling out the windows and up the sides of the house now. What a parasite fire is, he thought.
It never occurred to him that he was one too.
FOURTEEN
"Hey," Steve Battie called to Terri as she was going through the corridor and the emergency room. He was in an examination room. "You've got to stop and see this."
"What do you have?" she asked stepping into the room. The sight before her stopped her cold. Her first thought was it looked like a patient who had overdosed on Coumadin, an anticoagulant drug to help prevent the formation of blood clots in the blood vessels or dissolve them by decreasing the blood's ability to clump together. Because they prevent clotting, they can, if poorly managed, cause severe bleeding.
Terri had never seen a case like this, even in her textbooks. Two lines of blood trickled out of the young woman's eyes like red tears. The trauma appeared all over her body. It looked like an explosion of arteries and veins. There was no question she had intracranial bleeding as well.
"She expired about ten minutes ago."
"Was she a hemophiliac?" Terri asked.
"Don't know yet. She has been in the hospital before, so we're tracking down her medical history, but if ever I saw an example of a congenital or Acquired Factor II deficiency, this is it," Battie replied.
Terri nodded. She knew, of course, that normal blood coagulation was a complex process involving as many as twenty different plasma proteins, or blood coagulation factors. The complex chemical reactions using these factors took place rapidly in a healthy person to form an insoluble protein called fibrin that stops bleeding. To be congenital, the woman would have inherited it from both parents. What triggered alarms in her mind, however, was that acquired Factor II deficiency resulted from one of three possibilities: a severe liver disease, the mismanagement of the anticoagulant drug, or a vitamin K
deficiency.
A nurse came into the room and handed Battie a file.
"Hold on," he said to Terri. She watched him read. He flipped a page. "She was brought in here for an appendectomy. No history of bleeding, a normal blood workup. She wasn't put on any anticoagulant for any reason here."
"How long ago?"
He looked up again.
"Just three months."
"My God," she whispered. "I've got to get to a phone." She went out to the desk and called Will Dennis.
"Sorry," she said, "neither of us are getting any sleep tonight," she began, and then told him what she feared.
"No, you go get some sleep, Doctor," he told her. "I'll call you at your office tomorrow, or should I say, today, as soon as I have anything definitive." She agreed. There really wasn't anything more she could do here anyway. She debated going to her own home, but the memories of Curt collapsed at her door were still too vivid. Why the police impersonator would be coming for her, she did not know. In his madness, he was convinced perhaps that she wasn't telling him something she knew. The chances of a so-called normal villain returning to her home after having a confrontation with someone like Curt were probably very slim, but they weren't dealing with anything like a normal villain here, so when the cross streets came up at which a right turn would take her back home or a left would take her to Curt's, she turned left. The key was under the flowerpot to the right of the front door as usual. She let herself in and then paused. Being here now with Curt hurt and in a hospital room suddenly brought tears to her eyes. Maybe if she had been more forthcoming at the hospital parking lot, they wouldn't have argued and he wouldn't have felt it necessary to come to her house to patch things up. She should have been less the doctor, and more the fiancee, she concluded. Curling up in his bed gave her a sense of security and contentment, however. The scent of his cologne and hair dressing was there and it was something she welcomed. She had crawled in naked too. Pretending they had just made love, she turned over and closed her eyes. She hadn't realized just how exhausted she was until that moment. It took only seconds, it seemed, for her to fall asleep. Sometime before morning, she woke with a start. Whether it was a nightmare or what, she wasn't sure, but the echo of what sounded like someone at a window remained in her ears. She shuddered and then slowly sat up and listened hard. If he found her home, why wouldn't he be able to find Curt's, knowing he was her fiance?
Why didn't she consider this and go to a motel?
She reached for the phone. Call the police to her aid again? She was feeling so stupid. I'm behaving like a hysterical person, she thought.
She knew where Curt kept his pistol and went to the drawer. It was there and it was loaded. He had insisted they take target practice together.
"I'm sworn to do all I can to save lives," she told him. "How can I fire a pistol at someone?"
"If that someone is going to take your life, you're going to let it happen because of your Hippocratic oath? What will you be able to do for your patients when you're dead?" he reasoned.
"All I'm saying is I can practice with you, but I don't know if I can ever fire the gun at someone."
"You'll know," he said with a smile of cold confidence. "If the occasion should ever arise, you'll know."
She grasped the pistol and, after taking a deep breath, walked slowly out of the bedroom and listened again in the hallway. A squeak at a window in the den sent a hot chill down her spine. Heart pounding, she walked to the door of the den and peered in.